Joel from MacUpdate replied to my earlier posting about MacUpdate publicizing a crack:
This was published by someone in training behind the scenes at MacUpdate. Once we found out, we immediately removed it from out site. Next time, we suggest emailing us to let us know if you see something that is this big of an issue… otherwise we may not find out.
Fair enough, but this does illustrate a problem with this genre of update sites: users prefer the site that’s the fastest in publishing updates, so it’s hard to stay on top and still spend adequate time ensuring the quality of the entries.
Offloading the editing to the public helps with this, but I’m not sure the end result of that would be much better: the egalitarian list-everything nature of MacUpdate, VersionTracker and iusethis is a big part of the Mac software ecosystem’s low barrier to entry. I guess it’s a pretty tough balancing act.
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